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Re: [Phys-l] Lack of rigor: low increase in crit. thinking



Just one brief comment. The word hard or harder relates to the surface characteristic of materials. Students should take 'difficult' courses not "hard" courses.

Thanks

Steve

________________________________________
From: phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu [phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu] on behalf of Jack Uretsky [jlu@hep.anl.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2011 1:14 AM
To: Forum for Physics Educators
Subject: Re: [Phys-l] Lack of rigor: low increase in crit. thinking

The human brain isn't complete earlier than age 25. What do you expect?
Regards,
Jack

"Trust me. I have a lot of experience at this."
General Custer's unremembered message to his men,
just before leading them into the Little Big Horn Valley




On Mon, 5 Sep 2011, John Clement wrote:

The important part of the article in the link is:
"Students study in Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington in
Seattle. The authors of Academically Adrift find that in the first two years
of college, "with a large sample of more than 2,300 students, we observe no
statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and
writing skills for at least 45 percent of the students in our study."

But is this different from what used to happen in college? I suspect it is
not. We know that thinking skills do not generally rise in most standard
college courses, but Lawson and others have shown that a learning cycle
based course does show improvement. Computer science education has shown
that CS courses do not improve the ability to use formal reasoning as
measured on the PLT propositional logic test.

The authors attribute this to a decrease in writing, but I do not remember
doing all that much writing 50 years ago. On the other hand Shayer & Adey
have shown an increase using Thinking Science which improve English, math
and science skills, but does not have much writing. But it does target
specific thinking skills.

There is no evidence that "rigor" improves the thinking skills. One needs
to compare students before and after "rigorous" courses. Usually rigor
denotes harder material, but if you want to improve thinking, then the
material does not necessarily have to be harder, but targeted at the skills
you want students to achieve. And it has to be done in a research based
fashion. In the past "rigorous" courses may have weeded out lower students,
but it is not know if they improved thinking. Filtering is not improving.

The authors have not shown that skills have decreased, but merely that
skills are low. That is not the same thing. When you have politicians who
can go through universities, including Ivy League schools and scoff at
evolution, you know there is a problem with what they are learning.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX






-----Original Message-----
From: phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu
[mailto:phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu] On Behalf
Of Bernard Cleyet
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2011 4:26 PM
To: Forum for Physics Educators; The Physics Learning Research List
Subject: [Phys-l] Lack of rigor: low increase in crit. thinking

Alluded to, but I don't remember the study's report's link posted.

In College, A Lack Of Rigor Leaves Students 'Adrift' : NPR | LinkedIn


http://www.linkedin.com/news?actionBar=&articleID=363377354&id
s=0Ud34Ne3cPc3sIc3wUc3oVcj0Tb3sVdjsMe34MdOMTej4TdP4Pc3sId3kPdP
sPcPoP&aag=true&freq=weekly&trk=eml-tod-b-ttle-68&ut=1vxG-3vxiDv4U1

bc
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Forum for Physics Educators
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_______________________________________________
Forum for Physics Educators
Phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu
https://carnot.physics.buffalo.edu/mailman/listinfo/phys-l

_______________________________________________
Forum for Physics Educators
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